Literacy--Day 5

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LFS Lesson Plan
Unit EQ: Why is it important for you to be "digitally literate"?
LEQ: What are the ABCs of Website Evaluation?
Activating Strategies:
Ask students to recall as many things as they can from their "things to look for on a webpage" lists that were created yesterday.
Acceleration/Previewing/Vocabulary:
Explain that "truncating" and URL means that you "trim it back" to the original address--without any additional extensions.
Teaching Strategies and Distributed Guided Practice/Summarizing Prompts:
  1. Remind students of the list they developed yesterday of "things to look for" on a webpage when determining if it's factual or not. Explain that today, they are going to learn and practice a few other tricks that will help them make this determination.
  2. Hand out the "ABCs of Website Evaluation" and go over it with students. Explain that while they probably made a more detailed list yesterday, this "trick" (remembering ABCDE) will hopefully be something they can remember permanently when they look at websites in the future.
  3. Teach students how to do the "link test" (which is related to the "E"--external--on the website eval sheet). Visit the NW Pacific Tree Octopus site and remind them that it's a hoax site. Tell them that you're going to show them how to do a "link test" so that you can see who links TO this site. (Seeing WHO links to a site might give you an idea of WHY they're linking to the site). To do a link test:
    1. Go to www.google.com
    2. in the search area, type link: (link with a colon) and then paste the address of the site you're checking right after the colon. It will look like this: link:http://zapatopi.net/treeoctopus/ Note that there are NO SPACES before or after the colon.
    3. Look at the search results and show the kids that many of the sites that link to the Pacific Tree Octopus show that it's a hoax. (ex. http://www.netmom.com/component/content/article/3-newsflash/4-newsflash-3.html)
  4. Show the kids how to "truncate" a URL and explain that this will sometimes show them "where the site came from" and might give them a little background about the author. To truncate:
    1. Go to the Pacific Tree Octopus site and remove the ending of the URL so the only http://zapatopi.net remains. Show them the page and find some details that might explain that the site is a hoax (Iook at the "Welcome" message).
  5. Have the students visit http://21cif.imsa.edu/rkitp/challenge/evaluation/author.swf (link saved in Moodle) and complete the activity. It teaches them to look for author information and how to truncate URLs.
Summarizing Strategies:
Students could blog about what they learned.